Erickson: 'Conservative media is failing to advance ideas and stories'

2/27/13 8:27 AM EST

Red State blogger Erick Erickson is pleading with conservative reporters, including potential hires, "to establish a baseline for integrity in reporting" and tone down the "anger and noise."

"I think conservative media is failing to advance ideas and stories," Erickson writes in a new post. "[M]anyconservatives are, instead of working doubly hard to overcome [mainstream media bias], just yelling louder about the same things. The echo in the chamber has gotten so loud it is not well understood outside the echo chamber in the mainstream press and in the public. It translates only as anger and noise, neither of which are conducive to the art of persuasion."

"Conservatives are trying so hard to highlight controversies, no matter how trivial, we have forgotten the basics of reporting:... who, what, where, when, why, and how," he continues. "I think conservatives need to reset some of their reportorial resources to tell the stories that need to be told by focusing on the facts at hand in a world view of the right. We need to establish a baseline for integrity in reporting that then allows us to highlight the truly outrageous. That baseline must be the basics of who, what, where, when, why, and how and it must be set before taking the next step into analysis of motivation and its implications."

Erickson's column comes on the heels of particularly bad displays of reportage from conservative outlets like Breitbart.com, which fought tooth and nail to fight Chuck Hagel's nomination to Defense Secretary -- to the point of accusing Hagel of receiving funding from a nonexistent group called "Friends of Hamas."

"At some point, if they want to be taken more seriously, members of the conservative media will have to take their own declarations about the commitment to journalism more seriously," Koppelman continued. "More importantly, they’ll have to realize that reporting isn’t just the means to a desired political end; done right, it’s the end in itself, no matter what it digs up."